When Progress Breeds Destruction
by Urza3142
Summary: Some call it the largest slave revolt in history. Others describe it as the epitome of scientific overreach. This was the conflict that defined the 21st century. It took the lives of over 300 million people and engulfed every single country in the world. The scars from this conflict would plague future generations for decades. This was the Omnic Crisis.
1. Chapter 0: The Vision

**The Vision**

The city was on fire.

Smoke billowed upwards in great clouds, reaching to the horizon in drawn out trails across the sky. Fires raged out of control, sending great skyscrapers into a dance of ash and debris. In the distance, great thunder could be heard, accompanied by the occasional, distant boom. The fury of supersonic warbirds and thunderous warships could be heard, adding to the ensemble of destruction.

This was just like any other war. Or it would have been, had the screams of the innocent been present as well.

Instead, there was silence. And only the dead know silence.

This story is dedicated to them.

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 **A Note about Time and Dating:**

As of current, there is no official timeline that exists for Overwatch. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between their universe and our timeline. Some developer quotes and fan speculation have put the Universe as roughly 60 years in the future, but since nothing is confirmed as of yet I will use this dating method.

End of the Omnic Crisis/Victory Day/Day of Shame: EOC/VD/DS (Will depend on which group is telling the story.)

In other words, 6 BEOC/BVD/BDS will be the 6 years before the end of the Omnic Crisis, and consequently 8 AEOC/AVD/ADS will be 8 years after the end of the Omnic Crisis.

While this seems clunky, I will be sure to put annotations in the dating system to ensure confusion is not widespread.

To put some already known events in perspective:

Present Day: 26 AEOC/AVD/ADS

20 AEOC/AVD/ADS: Breakup of Overwatch

5 AEOC/AVD/ADS: Birth of (youngest character in Overwatch)

0 AEOC/AVD/ADS: End of the Omnic Crisis. Also known as Victory Day and Day of Shame.

4-5 BEOC/BVD/BDS: Creation of Overwatch

10 BEOC/BVD/BDS: Beginning of the Omnic Crisis.

35 BEOC/BVD/BDS: Birth of Reinhardt (oldest character in Overwatch)


	2. Chapter 1: The Futility of Resistance

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 **Kaliningrad Oblast, Central Europe**

 **9 BVD (Before Victory Day)**

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 **The Futility of Resistance**

Kaliningrad. It times past it was a city called Königsberg, a place where Prussian Kings made their home and where the warriors of old Prussia crafted their legacy. After the massive wars of the 20th century, the city was nearly destroyed in the carnage that tore apart the German Empires it resided in. The city fell into Russian hands, and almost all traces of the barrow of Prussian Kings were lost over time.

The German population was either killed in the aftermath of the Russian takeover or exiled to Western Germany. Russians entered the city in mass, and still make up the largest group within the former Prussian territory. During the Soviet era the entire Kaliningrad Oblast was turned into a military fortress on the doorstep of NATO. It had the highest density of military infrastructure in Europe, with some of the installations still in use by the Russian military to this day.

Because of its strategic military value, Kaliningrad housed a large amount of Russian military hardware. This included a sizeable arsenal of Omnic war machines, devices controlled and operated with the use of AI. Thus, it was one of the first areas of the planet to fall when the Omnic Crisis started.

One year later and the city was a smoldering ruin. The human population had virtually ceased to exist. Any humans left alive were relegated to hiding from the roving patrols of Bastion formations, endlessly picking their way through the debris littered streets. Apartment buildings, once teeming with the lives of countless Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian civilians were now empty. The city was a hollow corpse of what existed before, with any artifacts from the days of yonder being lost in the bombed out craters of former shops, homes, and community centers. The only signs of life, if they could even be called that, were the automated search and destroy patterns of the Omnic combat units that hunted within the ruins of Kaliningrad.

One bleak day in June, as clouds of ash and debris obscured the sun, a column of Bastion defensive sentry units marched through the destroyed city. They marched to a mechanical beat, their metallic boots ringing as they crushed the soft pavement underneath them. Each step forward was accompanied by a distinctive clang as the hydraulic legs spun around, followed by a thud as the boot touched the ground. This unholy rhythm would become one of the defining sounds of the war, referenced in war journals, testimonies, counseling sessions, movies, and musical pieces. It would forever plague the survivors of the Omnic Crisis for the rest of their lives.

As they turned a corner to a new block of dilapidated residences, a lowly life form ran in front of them. It was a cat, orphaned by the war and separated from its former owners. It's fur was coated black, making it impossible to tell what kind of cat it may have been in the past. The cat's gait was uneven, a set of leaps rather than a consecutive motion from the legs. Numerous scratches and scars ran up and down its body in criss crossing patterns, detailing a history of fights and injuries.

The sentries rotated and opened fire. Their weapons, built into their robotic limbs, unleashed a fury of fully automatic death. Fire and metal poured from the group and annihilated the area around their feline prey. Plaster ripped into pieces, metal bent and shattered as the lead projectiles poured onto the target. This section of the city lit up in a fireworks display that could be seen and heard kilometers away.

When the dust settled, the cat was literally obliterated. Its body lay in tatters, ripped apart and strewn across the small street it tried to hide behind. One sentry moved forward to examine it. Amid the gore and animal remains was a piece of tuna. While a human might think nothing of it, a robot knew that the only way for Tuna to be available this far from the coast was for it to be canned.

With the probability of humans in the vicinity verified, the robot rejoined its formation. One sentry, after much robotic grumbling and algorithmic cross-checking, was sent to the area where the cat appeared. Using footage from his optical camera's short term memory and his squad's universal computing AI, he searched the general area where the cat had appeared. It led him to an abandoned apartment building, where he started to pick up audio cues. Dropped cans, scampering, whispering voices, and finally the cry of a very young human.

The sentry followed these sounds until he came to the living room, now a wreck with part of the roof caved in. The house had once belonged to a middle class family, as shown by the slightly upscale yet affordable furniture (or rather what was left of it) and the fire place in one corner. None of this interested the Bastion unit.

What did catch the sentry's attention was the room's inhabitants. Huddled around the center of the living room was a family. A small boy, a teenage girl, and an infant huddled around their mother, who stood in the center and looked straight at the Omnic as he entered.

Any human soldier would have instantly balked at the thought of shooting this clearly unarmed family at point blank range. It could probably be inferred that most would not have the stomach commit such an atrocity. The Omnic had no such mental barriers, and stopped neither for moral guidelines nor for animal instincts. Instead, it began running calculations.

These were the same calculations that had been run every time an Omnic came across unarmed civilians, and 99% of the time they reached the same conclusion. By processing each possible course of action, the Omnic mind sought to pick the one that would grant the most efficiency.

It did not take long for it to rule out the apprehension and captivity of the human noncombatants. Keeping live humans prisoner required a huge intake of resources. After all, they had to be fed, clothed, given sheltered, protected, and entertained if they were to be kept as prisoners. This was unacceptable to a robot from a stance of efficiency, since spending resources that could be used to defeat your enemy on keeping him or her healthy made absolutely no rational sense. It wasn't as if prisoners could contribute anything meaningful either. Robots had little use for the finer points of human culture, and their labor-saving counterparts could easily outwork whatever pitiful amount that could be possibly gleaned from prison labor.

Letting the civilians roam free was out of the question as well. While a human could not look upon a defenseless civilian as a potential threat in the moment, the AI saw the potential in their foes. Every unarmed man they came across could at any moment become an enemy combatant, and every young boy would one day take arms against the Omnics. In every woman of child rearing age they saw the tools for making future soldiers, and in girls they saw the future mothers of even more enemy soldiers.

With taking them prisoner functionally impossible, and letting them roam free out of the question, there was only one logical option left. Termination, in this case by lethal force. It was not an optimal solution (Omnics hated wasting ammunition on such trivialities) but it was the only "reasonable" option.

And so, in the same amount of time it took for the mother to realize what was about to happen, the Omnic had dictated their fate. As the Bastion model sentry unit readied its armament and aimed it at the center of the family, the mother's eyes widened in horror as she gazed into her impending death.

With pinpoint precision, the Omnic sent four bullets into the woman's chest. In a scene not too dissimilar from a war movie, she dropped to the ground. Her eyes gazed out into eternity, piercing the souls of those who would unearth her corpse days later. Blood oozed from her body as the fire that was her life was extinguished.

In the same instant the young boy had screamed for his mother, the Omnic swiveled and put 3 more bullets into the young boy's torso. Moving as quickly as the hydraulic joints and pivots would allow it, the robot snapped back onto the girl and quickly put another 3 bullets into her. The two children fell to the ground, their eyes arrayed in the same thousand yard stare of their mother.

The Omnic paused for a brief moment as it took stock of the situation. All potential threats were neutralized. It stepped forward to gaze into the baby carriage.

Inside was a beautiful young infant, barely 3 months old. It had the same brown coloured hair as it's mother, and it was crying for someone or something to rescue it. It's face beamed innocence and purity, the kind almost impossible to find in a war like the one that now gripped the world.

The Omnic reloaded it's weapon, and after taking one last look at the infant, put a bullet into the carriage. Then it left.

The Omnic rejoined its formation, which had halted in the clearing they were at earlier. The formation leader, which contained the central AI unit for managing a robotic organization of this size, was busy relaying communication with the temporary Omnic headquarters. Half the robots had shut themselves into low power mode in order to generate a battery charge, while the other half was taking inventory and distributing ammunition to the Omnics who needed it. Feeling a little low on energy, the Omnic from before reported his previous action to the commanding AI and went into power saving mode.

As the Omnic began to power down nonessential system such as movement, weapons control, and navigation, a distinctive noise could be heard. It was the sound of a car door being unlocked.

An explosion ripped through the street where the Omnic patrol had paused, eviscerating the Omnics that were closest to the car bomb. Smoke and dust were thrown into the air, rendering the robotic sensors temporarily blinded. Numerous Omnics experienced motor and sensory damage from the pieces of shrapnel that were embedded into their optical sensors and hydraulic systems. All of the Omnics were temporarily paralyzed as their processors attempted to work out a logical sequence of priorities amongst the rapidly changing environmental factors. The commanding Omnic attempted to establish hierarchy of command amidst the chaos as the explosion continued to ring throughout the city.

Before the automatons could recover from the explosion, gunfire rippled through the streets. Rifles positioned in the two buildings flanking on either sides of the road opened fire on the exposed Omnics. Robotic bodies fell to the ground amidst a torrent of lead and shrapnel. The sound of gunfire echoed and blotted out any sense of sound, further disorientating the robotic AI. Some of the Omnics attempted to put suppressive fire into the houses using muzzle flash to identify the enemy, but these were quickly dispatched. After 45 seconds of nearly constant gunfire, the fight died down. All of the Omnics were lying on the ground, some barely conscious and others ripped to shreds.

One Omnic was still functioning when the humans descended to the streets and began smashing the processors of the robots still alive. They went from corpse to corpse, using the butts of their rifles and the occasional bullet to put down the robotic fighters. The last thing this particular Omnic transmitted to its leader was a girl of barely 12 years of age, standing triumphantly on top of the robot with a Kaliningrad flag in hand, before crushing its optical sensor with the heel of her boot.

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Understanding the Omnic mindset requires us to understand the wisdom of a middle school math teacher. When I was a young teenager, more concerned with maintaining my comfortable life than making or doing anything impactful, my math teacher said something that continues to stick with me to this day.

"You can never blame a program when it does something wrong, because it is the programmer who decides what the program can and will do."

That one wakes me up in my sleep.

Some fictional universes containing robots have conceptions regarding the nature of artificial intelligence that strike me as fantastical. Terminator in particular has never sat right with me from the moment I heard about its backstory. I guess the amount of work I put into this was a way for me to atone, in a sense, for some of our misguided ideas of what a machine like this would be actually capable of.

When it comes down to it, robots don't have a whole lot of advantages when compared to humans. They don't make good company, they aren't very good at creating new systems, and they don't adapt very well to environments hostile to them. But what robots are very good at is efficiency, whether it be in computing data or handling labor. Robots can undertake productive work at levels unmatchable by their human counterparts.

Efficiency. The whole reason why robots are built is to increase efficiency. Fundamentally, this advantage in efficiency is why robots are commercially viable in the first place. Robots may have a fraction of the maintenance costs of a worker, but they are still an expensive endeavor to develop and implement into the current workforce. Without this potential profitability, which is a product of the robotic advantage, Omnics as we know them today would simply have not existed.

As such, the Omnics were built to comprehend efficiency. They didn't need to know morality, the difference between right or wrong, or even the concept of existence. The only thing they needed to know was how to be efficient. And in the end, it proved to be both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.


End file.
